Economic Ethics, Overview

Economic ethics can be defined in two ways: First, in a broader sense, it analyzes the justification and the conditions of implementation for ethical norms in the economy. This article gives overviews of both the historical development of economic ethics and the main theoretical approaches in this field: virtue ethics, discourse ethics, and contractarian ethics. Second, in a narrower sense, economic ethics discusses ethical problems in areas quite different from the domain of business, using methods and results from economics. Economics, according to this view, holds inherent lessons for ethics, in particular, concerning the role of competition and the law.